I can hear where the sounds of jazz come from, a visual response.

Deep in the city, the sounds of engines echo off the thousands of windows as a motorcycle opens its throttles erasing the sounds of sudden escalations of conversations; there is a thickness in the air; I am behind the curtains looking down with the air conditioner humming out its cool air behind me. In the corridor, snippets of German emerge and disappear into the elevator.

The sudden roar of a bus brings me back to the window, the street is clearing and in the distance, a gaggle of cranes are still against the darkening light, ready tomorrow to pour more boxes into the sky.

The orange sky between the buildings fades, and thousands of windows come alive; an array of harmonic colours and my attention dances from window to window to the sounds of the street. The street sounds now are thinning out as people move about slowly in the fading heat.

Having descended, I wait at the crosswalk masked. One micro shop after another before me, a fusion of foods. Then my mind wanders; how many days has there been no rain? Has it been weeks or months… my watch pings, telling me, “the drought needs conservation.” I am cocooned in this street. The light changes with the sounds around me.

Returning, warm containers in hand, I look up to the penthouse on the corner. A plastic air conditioning tube danglings out the window, and tinfoil obscures the bedroom windows. On a lower floor, a grinder sounds rhythmically adding a strange percussive beat.

Later from the 10th-floor window, the evening deepens into sirens, the opening throttles of Harleys, a fricative Ferrari muffler, then a light city hum for a while; it is hard to sleep. My mind meanders, the watch vibrates, the phone pings, the TV whines in the next room… it is even harder to find the footnotes in this state. In the streets below, the cars are now more infrequent than the pedestrians in these rivers of sound.